1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to character presence detectors within character recognition units; and, more particularly, to character presence detectors which provide character decisions at the data rate with one character decision each time a new binary bit of video data is received.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
Reference is made to the U.S. Pat. No. 3,883,843 issued to Minck et al. on May 13, 1975 and entitled "Method of and Circuit Arrangement for Centering a Character". The Minck patent shows and describes a centering apparatus which searches for a particular character information and background information distribution within a matrix memory. The occurrence (and non-occurrence) of the distribution is utilized to locate the center of a character in a particular font, OCR--A. The occurrences (and non-occurrences) are utilized to detect where lines which are orientated in a particular direction, are located. This information is utilized to locate the center of the character. The video is filtered by a conjunctive circuit to aid in locating the lines by altering the character and background information distribution. The center located is in a particular centering direction determined by the particular distribution utilized.
None of the prior constructions known in the art shows a character presence detector which is capable of detecting characters within a serial binary data stream without any information concerning the relative location of the characters or lines of characters within the video.